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In humanity’s search for life in the universe,
we’ve done a lot of looking and a lot of listening.
But to maximize our chances of connecting with extraterrestrial life,
we can’t just sit back and wait.
We need to reach out and try to make contact ourselves.
For more than half a century, we’ve begun doing just that.
But many of these early attempts were more symbolic than practical.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Galaxies, a team of American and Chinese
researchers propose a new message aimed at
improving its chances of being received and understood.
While the odds of success remain unfathomably small, the project is helping
refine our notion of who we really are and what is truly universal.
There are basically two ways of sending a message to the stars:
either in physical form or through a radio broadcast.
In the 1970s, scientists experimented with both.
The Pioneer plaque and Voyager golden records were physical objects attached to
the first spacecraft launched on trajectories
that would take them out of the solar system.
Each contained basic information about Earth
and a map pointing the finder back towards our solar system.
But it was all symbolic, contacting alien life
wasn’t the missions’ goal and none were aimed at a nearby star.
In theory, the so-called Arecibo message, sent in 1974, improved on that.
Transmitted by the Arecibo telescope,
it was sent at the speed of light towards M13, a cluster of 300,000 stars.
The message, though, turns out to have been more of a publicity stunt than
an actual communication attempt.
Because by the time it reaches its targeted point in 25,000 years,
M13 will be elsewhere in the Milky Way.
The newly-unveiled project, called Beacon in the Galaxy,
aims to improve on these previous efforts.
A key focus is on improving the odds that a message is
properly interpreted if it actually is received by intelligent life.
That might sound hard, but evidence suggests it’s
probably even harder than we think.
When one of the creators of the Arecibo message circulated a draft to
some of his friends, including a number of Nobel Prize winners,
not one successfully understood what it meant.
And they were humans!
One strategy employed by the Beacon message
is to remove as much extraneous information as possible.
The Voyager Golden Record was full of things meant to evoke a sense of
life on Earth: photographs, songs, spoken greetings, and the sounds of nature.
But, without any context, these would be
virtually impossible for alien life to understand.
Worse, they could prove to be distractions from more important messages,
like where Earth is located and when the message was broadcast.
The Beacon also relies on a special alphabet designed to be
resistant to the breakdown of signals radioed across huge distances.
That way, a simple transmission or decoding error
doesn’t turn 1s into 7s or 3s into 8s.
These symbols were first developed as part of a prior extraterrestrial
communication attempt, broadcast from Ukraine in 1999 and 2003.
Like previous messages, the actual Beacon signal would be a stream of binary
1s and 0s designed to be converted into simple pictures containing the information.
To make sure that the transmission is as clear as possible,
the authors calculate when and where the message should be sent.
Broadcasting around March 30th or October 4th
will reduce interference from the Sun’s own radio energy.
At the same time, the target should be as close to straight overhead as practical,
in order to minimize the amount of distortion from Earth’s atmosphere.
One final improvement proposed for the Beacon message
is an update to our galactic map.
The messages of the 1970s specified Earth’s location to 14 nearby pulsars,
neutron stars that send out perfectly repeating bursts of radio waves.
Since then, the scientists have realized that pulsars
might not be the best choice for a universal map.
For one thing, their unique pulse is only visible if you are
in the path of its lighthouse-like beam.
They’re also not terribly bright, and their positions
drift slowly around the galaxy, just like other stars.
For those reasons and more, the Beacon’s map
is made up of globular clusters instead.
Composed of hundreds of thousands of stars, these dense clusters shine in all
directions and are bright enough to be seen from virtually anywhere in the galaxy.
There’s also fewer of them in the Milky Way,
making it easier for ET to match the map to known objects.
So, given all of this planning, when will the Beacon message be sent?
Probably not anytime soon.
With the Arecibo Telescope no longer operating,
the authors propose sending the message from either
California’s Allen Telescope Array or China’s enormous FAST radio telescope.
There’s just one problem: neither of these facilities have the equipment needed
to broadcast a signal; they are designed to only listen.
Upgrading either would be possible,
but it’s a big undertaking that will require major financial investment.
But that does not mean that the Beacon in the Galaxy
is an entirely abstract exercise.
Working out how we might communicate with other intelligent life helps scientists
recognize what aspects of our view on the universe are, actually universal.
And, hey, if ET does come knocking,
projects like this one give us a solid first draft of what we might say!
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space!
I have an exciting announcement to make about the future of the channel.
Which is to introduce someone who some of you may be seeing for the first time,
and some of you may be seeing for the first time… horizontally.
Savannah, please join me on screen.
Hello!
I’m Savannah Geary, and I’ve hosted
SciShow’s TikTok and Shorts for a while now!
I’m very excited to now be talking about science in a wider-looking box.
I’m also a veteran of SciShow production and post-production stuff,
I have a background in environmental science, and I’m one of the
surprisingly large community of Floridians living in Montana.
The Florida to Montana pipeline is real.
We’re very excited to have Savannah on camera more,
so I hope you will all give them a warm welcome.
Their episodes will start showing up on SciShow Space real soon!
Cannot wait.
It’s, like, 60% black hole stuff, right?
It’s more like 70.
See you then, everybody!
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